ActsAsExpired¶ ↑

Acts as Expired allows you to set expiration information to any ActiveRecord based model.

Installation¶ ↑

Install using gems:

# config/environment.rb
config.gem 'gudleik-acts_as_expired', :lib => 'acts_as_expired', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

$ sudo rake gems:install
$ script/generate acts_as_expired_on_migration
$ rake db:migrate

Usage¶ ↑

Add acts_as_expired to your ActiveRecord model:

class Foobar < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_expired
end

Now you can set expiry date using expires!

# Set expiry using default settings
Foobar.first.expires! 

# Set expiry date 1 year ahead, and notification time 2 days before expiry
Foobar.first.expires! :at => 1.year.from.now, :notify_at => 2.days

# Set expiry date to 2010-01-01 and notification set to 12-01-2009
Foobar.first.expires! :at => Time.mktime(2010), :notify_at => Time.mktime(2009, 12)

# Find out if object has expired
Foobar.first.expired? # => true / false

Expire has some named scopes you can use to find expired/expiring objects.

# Find objects that has expired
Expire.expired  # => array of expired objects

# Loop thru objects that are about to expire
Expire.within(3.months.from_now).each { |expire| puts "#{expire.expirable.to_s} expires in #{time_ago_in_words(expire.at)}" }

Notifications¶ ↑

You can also set notification options to the Expire object, using notify_at and notify_email. notify_at is when notification should be sent, and notify_email is the email address the notification should be sent to.

The gem does not provide any methods to automatically send notifications, this is up to you. But here is an example of how this can be done. First create an ExpiredMailer:

# app/models/expired_mailer.rb
class ExpiredMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  def notification(object)
    raise ArgumentError, "notify_email not set!" if object.notify_email.blank?

    recipients  object.notify_email
    subject     "Notification about expiring object"
    from        "dev-null@localhost"
    body        :object => object
  end
end

Then setup a cronjob and run something like this using a rake task or script/runner:

Expire.notifiable.each do |expired|
  ExpiredMailer.deliver_notification(expired)
  expired.update_attribute(:notified_at, Time.now)
end

The gem ships with an ExpiredMailer, you can install it with ‘script/generate acts_as_expired_mailer’. But it’s not made to be portable, so it probably won’t work out-of-the-box. I recommend you create your own expired_mailer.